Wurm Team Blog

Meanwhile far far away

rolfjan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:51:08 +0000

On the wild server, the Mol Rehan kingdom is under large pressure from the champions of the Horde of the Summoned. Their priests are said to create death zones from which there is meagre chances to escape and few are lucky to emerge alive.

I’m currently debugging the new deed system. It’s a lot of work and it needs to be done asap because of decay rates with new containers that needs fixing. So it’s overtime for me.

We’re experiencing more winter here in Sweden than we’ve done in 20 or 50 years or something. I love every minute of being outside even though -10 degrees celsius is a bit cold.

As I logged on to check something on the wild server, I found myself in a settlement far away from the battle cries in the west and the snow here in Sweden.

A humid drizzle was falling and as I looked up I saw the rainbow. By the doorstep of a cottage someone had left a few gifts. Spring was in the air!

Is Wurm the future for MMOs?

jsanglier — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:29:00 +0000

I have recently been chatting to a group of MMO players at a site called MMO Voices. They are a self made group of around 200 gamers lead by a character called Beau Turkey. On a suggestion from yours truly, they have made Wurm Online their “Game of the Site” and have set up a little community on Golden Valley. A couple of them, including Beau have become quite addicted to our game even after only a few days and have been chatting about it madly. Beau has made the point on a blog post about how “Fantasies are not real, but collaboration is”, and how Wurm Online offers a level of collaboration and community that he has not encountered before. Beau has a real point here and this is something that occupies my mind a lot as I contribute to Wurm Online in my own small little corner.

This sort of game is the real future of casual social networking. Currently MMOs are split into two rough areas – those that have predetermined adventure of some sort, like WoW, and those that give you a graphic environment to do nothing but chat, like Twinity. Wurm is neither of those, because it offers both, but with a twist and that is what Beau puts his finger on; collaboration.

The best real life analogy to Wurm is probably the office or other work place. Social interaction within the working environment it far more lively and has more momentum than does sitting around a bar every night. This is because everyone is there for the same reason and has certain tasks that they have to do. In the modern office, these tasks do not take away from social intercourse but actually enhance it by forcing interaction; “pass the pen please.” This commonality allows relationships to grow very easily and firmly without having to know great details about the other people – in fact, too much detail can cause problems!

Wurm, almost uniquely, and possibly accidentally, offers the same environment. When you log in to your community on Golden Valley or Independence or Wild, there are things you need to do – either for yourself, or for the community. But most of what you do does not stop you being able to chat; it is amazing how much you can say while chopping a tree down!

I watch the conversations sometimes as I am digging someone out of a mine or planting a thousand trees at Glitterdale (oh, THAT is where the trees came from!) – there is something about Wurm that makes me more nosey than is natural for me!

“Hey, have you played the new XX game?”
“Yeah, last night – pass me a nail, will you?”
“Isn’t it amazing?”
“Oh wow, yeah, loved the crafting system. Oh, damn, I have left the forge on.”
“Going to play it later? Maybe we can talk on Vent.”
“Probably tonight, if I get these tools imped up – got an order for a pile of shovels from someone.”
“Okay, fair enough. Well if you are free I will see you then. I’ll be back later to farm anyway.”

And no one mentioned that they were actually playing a game already! This sort of conversation happens all the time in Wurm, and I am told by more experienced gamers than me that this is very unusual in games, as is the fact that people tend to automatically collaborate on wurm rather than compete. On Wurm you are happy that someone else is more skilled that you – its useful! I have never seen someone Jealous about someone else’s skills.

I have noticed more and more how players are using Wurm as their default social environment – especially on premium servers in the villages – and some go off and play other games as their gaming experience. The trick for the people working on Wurm is how we can leverage that more, persuade more people that Wurm should be their base camp for the rest of their fun, and of course fun in its own right. I have some very long term (and secret) ideas that hopefully will bind the community aspect of wurm even more while allowing even more adventure and more layers within the Wurmian society. Whether they will come off or work, I don’t know, I am still experimenting, but I think this game is a window into the future of gaming, and maybe, despite some occasionally clunky graphics (which are beginning to look rather wonderful, by the way Art Team!) and code bugs that drive Rolf up the wall, Wurm Online may be proving to be rather ahead of its time!

Happy New Year

enki — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:02:55 +0000

Hello everyone, I finally updated and joined the hip 2010 crowd. I figured it was about time I joined the rest of you as 2010 seems to be the in thing to do now, but I am not so “happy” about it.

I know it has that new year smell and new fancy wrapping and all, but is it really worth it? I mean aside from the new model number and improved smell is there really any reason to upgrade from last years model? For that matter who keeps breaking the last year? It was working just fine up until December 31st and then what happened? It seems like nearly every year I am forced to get a new model. I for one was just fine with the 2009 model and I figured if I could survive it why chance a new and untested year. We have to start living more environmentally friendly and I for one detest throwing out perfectly good things, especially years! I hate to think of all the landfills being filled up with all those perfectly good 2009s. Haven’t they heard of recycling!

Since we do not seem to be given a choice in the matter take my advice. Use this year up and don’t squander it, because before you know it they will be taking away our 2010s! Hang onto this year as long as possible! Make the most of it! Don’t let them take it away like they did our 2009s!

Merry Christmas!

rolfjan — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:37:35 +0000

I want to wish all the team members and all the players of Wurm a really Merry Christmas with all the snow, jingles and colors that come with it!

Vote Wurm

rolfjan — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:34:40 +0000

I received an email by a person involved in the setup of PC Gamer Top 100 site (www.pcgamertop100.com) today.

He said he himself was a big fan of Wurm Online and urged me to direct you guys there to vote for Wurm.

I consider just being eligible for votes there a big honour

I guess if you realize that you’ve actually played this game a lot it could be considered proof that Wurm is a good game worth voting for.

If we make it to the top 100 it would mean a lot for Wurm and maybe we can hire more people for development soon. Wurm would be featured in the March issue of PC Gamer UK as one of the top 100 PC games!

Here’s a cheer:
Vote for your online home! Vote Wurm!

On another note the religion and Christmas update is coming along nicely!

I blame Tich

Wolfram — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:21:28 +0000

I’ve not been very active lately, and it’s all Tich’s fault.

She happened to mention to me that she was thinking about buying a new game on the weekend, Dragon Age: Origins.

So I googled it and found this review video:

http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/dragonage/review.html

I thought to myself that it was exactly the kind of game I liked, similar to Baldur’s Gate. Turned out that it should have come as no surprise to me that it was like BG since it’s made by the same people. Anyway, I was intrigued enough that I jumped onto steam and bought the game then and there. Since then I’ve been completely captivated by this game, and have not found much time for Wurm. Therefore, it’s all Tich’s fault. Just kidding.

Anyone who is interested in the game should be warned that I see lots of posts on the forum saying that people are only taking 40 hours to finish it. Sounds like they should be playing wurm if 40 hours is too short. There must be some accounts that are up to 200 days or more in wurm by now.

Anyway, I’m upto 89 hours and the game says I have explored 39% of the world and done 28% of the game, but I’m very thorough in these types of games, so it’s not surprising that I have a much higher time than the speed players. Also, they do say that the game is very re-playable, since it has 6 origin stories, 4 endings and you can literally and figuratively take different paths through the game’s plot. You can do the major plot points in a different order as well since the game’s combat system seems to scale quite well according to your level.

The dialogue makes me cringe sometimes, but this isn’t exactly Shakespeare, and most of the time it’s pretty entertaining. I’ve also recognised a few of the voice actor’s voices from favourite tv shows.

Like Claudia Black from Farscape and SG1, whoever played Tuvok & Captain Janeway from Voyager, and there was another, but I forget whom atm. Of course most of the voice acting is top notch, so that makes up for any bad dialogue. The graphics are pretty good too, both the scenery and the models.

Anyway, I know this isn’t wurm related, but when I tried to log in tonight and found that my premium had expired, I thought I should let ppl know why I’m not around much atm. Plus, it’s xmas and I work in retail.

http://dragonage.bioware.com/

Where I bought it from. Australian players should note that with the current US dollar exchange rate, buying it on steam is a pretty good deal, if you can afford the download, it’s 8.9gb:

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Dragon+Age%3A+Origins

On a side note, Artashes and Annette, you should check your in-game mail, and Pete, I will get that chisel finished soon.

Christmas roadmap

rolfjan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:17:25 +0000

Just thought I’d share my plans for the rest of the year:

Announce the annual Wurmish christmas gift:
The plans are that it will be pretty much handled like last year where you will have all the time from the 24th to the 29th CEST to visit Santa.
As usual we will only hand out gifts to premium players because otherwise it will be abused and have to be a virtually useless gift.
I’ll see if I can come up with a better way to distribute the gifts so that you don’t have to travel far to the capitals to pick it up. More about that later.
Rounding up and launching the updated religion system. Manny has done a tremendous job keeping track of and sorting out the bugs in the code on the test server.
Grabbing a few of the more serious bugs by the throat: Boats getting stuck on mine entrances, mounts still disappearing near cave entrances, and rubberband teleporting in certain situations.
Coding and testing the christmas gift
Keep investigating more payment options, but I doubt we’ll see any before I’m back in the next year. I am discussing with a few companies.

Party with Notch

rolfjan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:06:06 +0000

This Friday we held the yearly shareholders meeting in Onetoofree AB.

We’re 6 people who own shares with me and Markus Persson (Notch) being majority owners. Every year I get this chance to invite the others to Motala and explain what’s been going on.

This year Markus decided to attend to my great pleasure. My dad owns a small percentage and lives here so he also attended.

I usually ask my dad to be the chairman for the meeting so I can just lean back drink coffee. At least that’s the plan but the meetings tend to become very engaging and there are always some numbers that need explaining so of course it never works that way.

Anyways, afterwards we had some bubbly and me and Notch went out and had dinner. After dinner we took a tour of the bars in town. Here are some photos of how we looked during the evening:

Markus Persson/Notch

Rolf

Be sure to check out Notch’s project Minecraft unless you have already!

Peeping up from the code

rolfjan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:26:14 +0000

At the moment I’m doing something that pretty much is the dream for any old pen and paper role player – creating magic spells.

I have such an interesting world to do it in as well. Not only can spells target creatures, items and areas – they can actually modify the world! The Tornado will blow down trees, the Disintegrate spell destroys rock and there will be spells that make trees and fields grow or damage houses and walls.

There will not be many graphical effects for magic at release but at least they are planned:)

I have all my assembled business cards in a heap in front of the screen and today I noticed one from Thor Olof Philogène of Enemy Unknown AB. I remembered him from Gamescom as a really nice guy so I decided to check their website out.

They run avatarsunited.com which they describe as

“Facebook for virtual world avatars”

Turns out they’ve added Wurm Online to their list of supported games in all silence!

So now, head over there and start feeding their website all of your character info and check out their service.

Virtual perfection

rolfjan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:50:09 +0000

I just saw this documentary called “Another perfect world” about MMO development and how we recreate society online. I recommend it to you if you’re interested in the subject.

This link works in Sweden only: http://svtplay.se/t/102869/k_special__virtuell_perfektion. Maybe you can find it streamed in your country.
I get upset by some of the things I hear about how other game development companies treat or treated their customers but I am not really surprised. Except maybe that Raph Koster states that it was considered an employment perk to spy on players and delete accounts. I assume the game was Ultima Online.

It has always been fairly obvious to me that most MMO game developers care little about their players and this documentary strengthens that opinion. It’s like they don’t even try to do it right.

The documentary also claim that often company employees help their friends and destroy their enemies, something I am sure happens. I am proud to say that in Wurm none of this has ever been allowed to happen. The reason why we don’t have many GM run events is to remove such suspicion.

I met the CEO of Eve Online Hilmar (who’s in the documentary) in Cologne. I got his business card and it had a scratch area with a code containing two months worth of playing time. Very cool.

I told him I was making the swedish equivalent of Eve but fantasy style, so he invited me to their party which was pretty awesome.

Now we just need to get 400k more customers!